1. Zionism claimed, in the years in which it was struggling to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, to speak for the needs and the desires of the world's Jews and to be able to mobilize them. And yet in actual fact most of the world's Jews opposed it or were indifferent to it. "Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Israel today," Segev writes, "the Zionist movement's principal opponents were Jews. The movement did not succeed in convincing most of the Jewish people that it was viable." Furthermore, "Most Jews who settled in Israel did not do so because they were Zionists. They came as refugees ... reluctantly."
But Segev misunderstands. Israel was a Jewish refuge of last resort, a place to escape to as a matter of survival -- mostly physical, but spiritual as well. Sure, Israel could not have provided great jobs with the right 401K plans... but what the hell does Segev think went on in Nazi Germany?! Does he think Jews were trying to leave for a few sheckels better salary? They were running for their lives!
Halkin helpfully points out that it is impossible to map out Jewish opinion from the time, as Segev claims to do.
2. Even had it established a Jewish state in Palestine sooner, Zionism could never have solved the Jewish problem as it aspired to solve it. On the contrary: the worse this problem became in the Hitler years, the more helpless the Zionist movement was revealed to be. The severe British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 1930s merely hid the fact that the country could not economically have absorbed large numbers of European Jews anyway. Hence a Jewish state in these years could not have prevented the Holocaust. Indeed, the "tragedy of Zionism" was that, "while it may have foreseen the catastrophe, the solution it offered was irrelevant.... The Zionists certainly could not have rescued millions."
Segev seems to think that all Israelis were working in factories or the service sector in the pre-state years. Kibbutz, anyone? Many Israelis were busy transforming the land from a desert wasteland into a fertile nation. Any escapees that could have gotten through would have found something productive to do, I guarantee it. But no one would let them do so. That was the problem, not Israel's minute economy.
3. Israel did not rescue those who reached its shores after the Holocaust either. The million Jews from Arab lands who flocked to it after 1948 were not the beneficiaries of Zionism but its victims. Indeed, it was Zionism's conflict with the Muslim world that forced them to flee their homes. "At this point in its history [too]," Segev argues, "the Zionist movement did not serve as a solution to the Jewish problem. On the contrary, it led to the uprooting of entire Jewish communities."
This is a valid point, but derivative of point #1. Jews were either expelled or came under threat because of the mere existence of Israel. Israel prompted the rise of Jewish persecution from simple societal cruise control to major policy goal. But Jews in Arab states were not exactly thriving there... In retrospect, it is hard to imagine more than a handful of Sephardim who truly regret their exodus from the Arab autocracies.
4. Both culturally and economically, Israel has failed utterly to fulfill Zionism's dreams for Jewish independence. Culturally, it has been totally Americanized while at the same time becoming "more [religiously] Jewish," so that the Zionist vision of a vibrant Hebrew society, secular yet firmly rooted in the Jewish past, has come to naught. Economically, Israel is so dependent on American aid as to have become "much like the old, pre-Zionist Jewish community in the Holy Land, which also lived off charity from the United States." The Zionist project of de-urbanizing the Jewish people and returning them to the land has also ended in failure, for whereas "in the mid-1950s, 16 percent of Israelis worked in agriculture, in the mid-1990s only 3 percent did." The new Jew that the Zionist revolution proudly boasted of creating has turned out to be nothing more than a Hebrew-speaking version of any Jew.
Israel was originally very European and socialist. That part of the Zionist ideology is hurting - so much the better.
As for reliance on U.S. aid, this is more a sign of the rotten disposition demonstrated by the rest of the world than a particular weakness of the Jewish state. It also shows the cultural and religious bonds (Europe shares some of the culture, but thinks little of the religion).
(It also might reflect Israel's screwy socialist economy, which needs reform)
As for "the new Jew", he/she works in the manufacturing and service sectors, the new economy. He/she no longer has to plow the field and so forth. Welcome to modern scientific agriculture and the technological world, Mr. Segev!
5. The most central of all Zionist narratives, the hallowed one according to which Zionism was not a colonial movement but a saga of an ancient people returning to its biblical land, has foundered, too, on the hard rock of modern science. The Bible itself can now be viewed as a mythical document with no basis in historical reality. Segev quotes with approval the Tel Aviv professor of archaeology Ze'ev Herzog, who writes: "Biblical historiography was one of the foundation stones in the construction of Israeli Jewish society's national identity.... Challenging the reliability of the Biblical accounts is [therefore] shattering the myth of the nation."
Halkin counters #5 by noting that "the notion that the Jewish people did not have a real biblical past in the historic land of Israel is today more a tool of anti-Israel propaganda than a proposition taken seriously by responsible scholars."
Halkin says that, according to Segev, "Israel is something worse than sinful. It is quite simply unnecessary, an incalculable waste of energy, money, sacrifice, and blood that has increased the sum total of human suffering while luring the Jewish people down a side alley of history to create a redundant copy of America in the Middle East."
One would never know from Elvis in Jerusalem that Israel--a hopeless charity case, according to Segev--is, despite a current economic downturn largely caused by the Palestinian intifada, one of the world's twenty-five most affluent societies as ranked by standard of living, per capita income, and productivity, infant mortality and longevity rates, and overall quality of life. Nor would one know that it boasts, after the United States, the world's highest number of annual high-tech start-ups (in which many billions of dollars of foreign venture capital have been invested, often with spectacular returns). Moreover, as its economy has grown and American aid has not, Israel has become progressively less dependent on the latter, which today forms a tiny fraction of its gross national product and could easily be--American military assistance excepted--dispensed with. Far from a story of failure, Israel's development in fifty years from an insolvent postcolonial state with few natural resources to an international technological power has been, under conditions of economic siege and intermittent warfare, a remarkable tale of success.
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